Women in the Workforce

Now is as good a time as any to state that I do not necessarily agree with everything stated in the links I now have in the right hand column of this blog. Usually I list links because I think the blog or website makes interesting points that people don't usually think of or they have a good ability to piss people off. Such is the case with blogger and science fiction auther, Vox Day. In his WND column, Why women's rights are wrong, he (again) caused the hordes of rabid feminists to swarm down upon him by asserting that women in the workforce have caused real wages to decline and reduced the birthrate. He later asserted that women should not have the right to vote, but I'll address that later as this is already going to be a rather lengthy post.
Disappointingly, very few of the women who responded to these claims actually addressed the two main arguments (listed above). They have instead contented themselves to mock and belittle him as well as themselves:

"Jesus....for a woman....I just made this guy look like an idiot. I better get back in the kitchen. What are these shoes doing on my feet?"

What a loser! Oh yes, because my only, most important goal in life is to get married to some guy like you who'd keep me pregnant and in the kitchen and stupid until I either died in childbirth or just got too old. Because honestly, I can't even IMAGINE a better, more fulfilling life than that. Please...

Hey, I dislike wearing shoes in the house, so I find myself not only barefoot, but very often in the kitchen. This has not yet made me pregnant, nor stupid.
In any case, I've decided to take it upon myself to address the issue of women working outside the home.

First of all, the picture of the middle class housewife of the 1950s was just that: "of the 1950s." Previously, the middle class (and thus the majority of most women) did not have the wealth nor the time to dedicate their lives entirely to maintaining a home and socializing. Rather, they were more likely to be working along side their husbands to create economic value and earn income to keep themselves afloat. They ran farms together and various "cottage industries." It was well accepted and expected that a woman who married a baker, butcher, or tailor would become "the baker's wife" and serve customers behind the counter, or help him baste shirts and sew. Until the 1920s, most clothing was made within the household; it was less expensive than buying ready made clothes and, until washing machines were ivented, a great amount of time was spent making and maintainng the family's clothing alone. Combine that with food production (very often involving caring for chicken and cows) and cleaning the house (no vacuums or cleaning solutions), and you have accounted for most of women (and men's) time.
Up until the 1950s, only upper class women could really be said to be homemakers and socializers: they "made" (managesd) the home while servants did the work. Their husbands took on the full burden of providing the income, but also benefited from the immense social contacts provided by their wives, which resulted in more business opportunities...and then more income.

Only later, thanks to advances brought on by the transition from the industrial age to the information age, did the 1950s middle class homemaker come into existance. Clothing became cheaper to buy than to make, washers and dryers became less expensive and more efficient, and the number of middle class families in the United STates increased dramatically thanks to the post-World War II economic boom. Vacuum cleaners meant that rugs and carpets no longer had to be beaten. Convenience food (McDonalds and TV dinners) meant meals no longer ahad t o be made from scratch. Schooling became mandatory and the norm for children from age 5 to age 18 for the first time in American history. The rise of large corporations with a highly specialized workforce meant that women could not work alongside their husbands and help create economic value within the home as they had earlier on.
THe result? Women no longer felt like they had anything to do. Schools took the children, company's took the men, restaurants took the dinner, and technology took the cleaning.
Just as some men are illsuited for idleness, so are some women; that the middle class housewife quickly became bored with her situation is the only conclusion I can reach, and she rapidly concluded that the grass is not only greener on the other side of the hill, but that it grows faster, too.
By an unhappy coincidence, this impression was aided and encouraged by socialist-feminists, such as Gloria Feinstein and Andrea Dawkins, who had never had children or families. They not only promised that careers were the answer to these women's boredom, but that thhey were proof of what a career could do. And so, lured by the promise of rejoining their husbands and no longer being left on the sidelines, they began to work. It was not a case, as Cardozo states, of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater: both had already been taken from her, one by the schools and the other by modern conveniences, such as indoor plumbing.
Then something odd happened: theUS made its first switch from elite culture to popular culture. The women's lib movement made having a job en vogue. Suddenly, it was cool to pretend that you had to work out of economic necessity; by this time women working had been reduced to the unfortunate lot of immigrant women and those women whose husbands were too drunk to take care of a family. So, upper class women who had never had to do a day's work in their lives before, suddenly got jobs. They didn't need the money any more than their middle class counterparts did; rather "they worked primarily for the psychic rewards with the money a secondary factor (Cardozo, 44)." In other words, they worked to make themselves feel needed.

I believe this would have happened with or without socialist-feminism deriding "women's work" since the amount of time spent on housework had decreased dramatically. However, I think that women would have entered the workforce with completely different expectations. Instead of expecting it to bring them happiness and for their job to become the cornerstone of their lives, they would have thought of it merely as something to do to keep them occupied and to become a way to fill the empty days while their children were at school and their husbands at work.

The other impact of feminism was to urge all women, married, unmarried, with babies, older children or no children at all to work. It was billed as the one-size-fits-all Road to Happiness and Enlightenment. So women who could work, did work.
The result of this is exactly as Vox Day asserted: the supply of workers increased while the demand remained constant. The price of workers fell.
However, vox also asserts that this was due to the fact that women were already domestic consumers and did not increase the level of consumption. This is false. While women entering the workforce did not increase domestic consumption as rapidly as immigrants entering the workforce would have, the did increase it. Suddenly, they needed work clothes, second cars became necessities, day-cares became necessities. More and more foods were bought pre-made, boxed, or eaten out. Since families now had two-incomes available, families began to spend more by demanding and buying bigger houses and more items that would have been considered luxaries or unnecessary by previous generations. A look at household debt levels in the US today, 30-40 years after the events I describe occured, shows that two-income households are definitely not saving the second income.
The results of this increased consumption are obvious: domestic demand for products such as cars, clothing, shoes, daycare and large houses is higher than in previous areas. This stimulated more demand for workers in these industries, which created more jobs, which created more wages. The sum result of women in the workforce on wages? Negligible, especially considering women's earlier presence, working as teachers, nurses, servants, telephone operators, and helping their husbands at their jobs.

Nowadays, it is largely assumed that all girls will grow up to be women who will hae careers and who will work. The socialist-feminist derisiion of homemakers and housework has become so entrenched that it no longer need be described as socialist-feminist. It is simply mainstream.
All of this belies evidence that the number of women opting to be stay-at-home moms and giving up careers is on the rise. The US birthrate is actually the highest among western nations and at 2.0 live births per woman, approaches the replacement rate of 2.1. Oh, for want of 1/10th of a child!

Why this sudden change? Many women have suddenly realized that the feminists who declared working fulltime and raising a family to be a piece of cake were lying: none of them had familes nor a corporate career. Rather, as feminists, writers and activists, their "jobs" were flexible and capable of being tailored to fit the whims of the individual woman. Traditional male-path careers are the exact opposite: rigorous hours in the office with lots of overtime in order to "get ahead" and constant competition.
Unlike men, most women find it impossible to keep their careers at the center of their lives. To be more blunt, most women have difficulty keepong any one thing at the center of their attention. Even while writing this, I have changed locations twice, shut the windows, helped my sister with my nephew, talked on the phonee and thought that maybe doing my homework might be a more productive use of my time.
Furthermore, without the feminists, I doubt women would have accepted the male career pattern of rigorous work hours, stress, and competition. Indeed, the work pattern emerging today among women is much more realistic: entrepreneuership (women are starting more companies in the US than men now and already own 30% of them), working-from-home, flextime, partime, all are possible. With more women staying at home or working only part-tiem while their children are in school, an optimist might say that society has reached a happy balance between the two and it is one that works well for the women who have a psychological need to work, or have bought into the socialist-feminst idea that children are a waste of time and staying at home will make you stupid.
It is also helpful to point out htat few men nowadays expect or even want their wives to stay at home. Being the sole provider was just as unusual for them when it happened in the 1950s as it was for women and they too have accepted the socialist-feminist views that women have. But this problem is easier to solve: men generally want their wives to be happy. They watched the discontented housewives go into the workforce and are now watching them as they head back out. It's probably easier than a divorce, right? And who among us can find a concrete definition of happiness that fits everyone?

So, what is the net effect of women working? Real wages fell, consumption rose by a smaller amount than they would have with immigrants...but really not a whole lot. Yes, family bonds were weakened, but the foundation for this was built when children began attending school full-time, not when women started working. The birthrate has fallen, but so have methods to control pregnancies, and technological advances have caused the infant mortality rate to rise, meaning fewer children are necessary.
Do I think women should work? I think it's up to the individual woman. Certainly it is important that they develop skills; if a woman does not work and her husband dies, it is not going to be a good situation for her or her family if she cannot find a job that pays well.
Simply put: women must be responsible for their decisions and they must think for themselves. Do not work because you think your life would be worthless otherwise. Do not work because you think you would go crazy if you had to be around your children 24 hours a day (1, you won't have to, 2, if you can't stand 'em, don't have 'em.). Do not work if you would rather be doing something else instead.
When I informed my family of my decision not to work, the response was largely negative: "I don't think you could ever be happy doing that" came from my father (despite the fact he had supported my decision to homeschool future children 100%. Who did he think was going to homeschool them? The dogs?). "Just wait until you have kids" and "Then why are you bothering with school" came from my sister. The most positive reaction was from my mother: "It's a difficult decision to make." My mother became a stay-at-home-mom not because it was what she wanted, but because it was what her religion told her was the only acceptable route for a woman to take.
I am not religious, and so I did not make this decision because "god wants me to," but because I can think of nothing more silly than to pay someone else to raise my children so that I can work. I actually enjoy being around children, as much as I do being around other human beings and sometimes more so.
My only wish is that society would stop swinging from one extreme to another and find itself a happy balance. You have no idea how much easier my decision would have been to make if someone had told me, throughout my schooling, that staying at home was an acceptable choice to make, but it literally did not occur to me. No one mentioned it. It's derided by all but a few religious people (not the best role model for an agnostic).
However, where public schools lack the information, most books have it. For anyone interested in more information on this, I recommend the book "Sequencing" by Arlene Cardozo, and any book by John Holt. The first offers a strategic method of arranging one's career to accomadate childrearing, while the other explains the nature of children.

I'll address the issue of women voting, which Vox also raises, in another post.